Kaizen

Kaizen (Japanese: 改善; "improvement") is a Japanese vocabulary word that outside of Japan has been adopted as a concept in business studies which asserts that significant positive results may be achieved due to the cumulative effect of many, often small (and even trivial) improvements to all aspects of a company's operations. Kaizen is put into action by continuously improving every facet of a company's production and requires the participation of all employees from the CEO to assembly line workers. Kaizen also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain. Kaizen aims to eliminate waste and redundancies. Kaizen may also be referred to as zero investment improvement (ZII) due to its utilization of existing resources. Kaizen originated from the work and knowledge of American business advisors tasked with Japan’s postwar recovery. These principles were later adopted and practiced in Japanese businesses, and most notably became part of The Toyota Way. It has since been popularized throughout the world and has been applied to environments outside of business and productivity.